


in medias res

by Thalius



Category: The Last of Us
Genre: Alcohol, F/M, Firsts, Fluff and Angst, Mild Smut, One Shot, Pre-Canon, Smoking, like very mild
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-22
Updated: 2019-10-22
Packaged: 2020-12-28 03:16:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21129860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thalius/pseuds/Thalius
Summary: Fistfights before an introduction, work before talking, fucking before kissing. They always start from the middle and work backwards.





	in medias res

**Author's Note:**

> tess is bae and i love how emotionally dysfunctional she and joel are. that is all.

They always start from the middle and work backwards.

The first time she meets Joel is in a fistfight. An asshole shows up where he’s not supposed to, trailing her in an alley behind the closed-out section of East 5th. He’s got a lot of ideas on his face and she likes exactly none of them. The shiv in her hand is more familiar than her own fingers, and when she buries it in the guy’s stomach, he doesn’t make a sound. 

Then two more assholes jump her, springing from garbage heaps so rotted the mould’s all dried up, and they grab her by the arms. She kicks the left one in the groin and pulls the right one into her so she can bite his ear. She gets kicked back, hard in the ribs and she knows she’ll be fucked out of the next two jobs with that kind of injury, and her fury makes her even more ruthless.

She’s handling them both fine, poking and punching and kicking and biting and stabbing a piece of glass into the left guy’s eye when the right one gets knocked over by someone else. She doesn’t bother to look because it’s none of her business right now, so she finishes killing the man hanging from the glass bit in her hand and lets him drop like a rock to the ground. When she turns she’s breathing hard, and the other man who attacked her is dead now, too.

More importantly, the new guy is patting down his pockets.

“Hey asshole,” she says, letting the glass drop from her grip and pressing her hand to her ribs. “That’s my shit.”

“You ain’t killed him,” he replies in a drawl that would’ve sounded gentle if it was coming from another man. He doesn’t look up, but gestures to the other dead guy on the ground. “And you got one, besides.”

“This isn’t a split deal.”

“You’re welcome.” He pulls a ration card and a couple of loose rounds from the guy’s front pocket and slips them into his jacket.

“Fuck you, you’re welcome. Get you hands off my new haul, Texas.”

He looks up at that. He’s older than he should’ve been, she thinks. Too much grey in his hair, too many lines on his face. Most people who looked like that didn’t move the way he did.

“I got a prior engagement with your man here,” he told her, ignoring her order. “I gotta finish it first.”

“Good for you.” She’s really breathing hard and realises her ribs are more fucked up than she thought. She stares him down, because then she doesn’t have to move. “Off.”

“One moment, ma’am.” After a lot of patting down, he finds a slip of paper from inside the fresh corpse’s jacket and nods in a satisfied kind of way, then stands up with a hand on his knee, grunting slightly. “Okay. All yours.”

She watches him do this in silence, dumbfounded. When’s the last time someone called her ma’am?

Then Texas clears his throat and touches his fingers to his forehead like he’s dipping a hat that’s not there. Christ, she’d been saved by an actual cowboy. “Goodnight.”

Her wits return to her and she holds up a hand. “Hold the fucking phone.” 

He pauses, watching her. It smells like shit in the alley, but she doesn’t want to move until they’ve squared a few things away.

“Your name,” she says, not leaving room for him to abstain because it’s not a request.

“Joel,” he tells her helpfully. “And your name is…?”

“Not yet. What’d you take from that guy?”

“Somethin’ I needed.”

“Be specific.”

“Somethin’ I needed to get paid,” he said, his mouth curling up faintly like this was a joke. 

Her ribs throb and her patience thins. Tess narrowed her eyes, and his smile drops. 

“Look, Miss Not Yet,” he tries again, his tone harder now. “I’m tired and I don’t wanna stand around here for much longer. I’d like to—”

“It’s Tess,” she interrupts him, not about to listen to his excuse. “And I wasn’t asking.”

“Tess?” he says, more to himself. His brow furrows, and she hears him mumble again. God, she wants to kick him in the knee.

Then the beam of a flashlight passes through the gate behind them, and she starts to run, swearing. Tess doesn’t check to see if her new friend is following behind her. She runs all the way back to her apartment block, and when she climbs the dumpster to get into the window of the back hallway, Joel’s gone. 

Fine by her. Piece of shit stopped her from checking that other guy’s pockets.

The next time she meets Joel, it’s by the wharf. She’s waiting for Malcom, a sweet kid who would probably be dead inside of six months if he kept trusting the amount of people he did, but when he arrives he brings unwanted company.

“Tess!” Malcolm calls too loudly, his teeth flashing white around dark lips. “So glad to see—”

“Who the fuck is that?” she asks, glaring at the man behind him. She can’t quite believe her eyes. Joel seems to recognise her, too, judging by the look on his face.

Now that it’s light out she can get a better look at him. Texas looks even older when the sun’s beaming down on him, but his eyes are a startlingly beautiful hazel. If he were ten years younger she’d tell him to sell his pretty face down at the docks instead of—well, whatever the fuck he’s doing here now. 

Or maybe Malcolm brought her a present. 

“Oh,” the kid says. “Uh, protection.”

“Howdy,” Joel says, because of course he does. He moved to extend his hand like she’s supposed to shake it. “I believe we’ve—”

Tess ignores him and looks back at Malcolm. “From?”

The kid scratches at the back of his head. “Heard Polanski was enforcing the east wall, the patch by the ‘48. She’s mad about all the tax-evasion.”

Tax-evasion. The term was supposed to be funny, but she’d never much liked the joke. Polanski hired thick idiots to stand outside the busier smuggling routes in and out of the city—as “lookouts”—and take a chunk out of whatever people bring back inside the walls as a levy. 

“Fucking parasite,” Tess mutters. “But I don’t need back-up.”

Malcolm shrugged. “Jared said this isn’t negotiable if we want the job. He doesn’t want a quarter of the haul taken by Polanski.”

Tess looks over at Joel again, sizing him up. He’s been polite with her, if a bit pushy, but she can see the steel in his face behind his ridiculous, well-mannered southerner act. 

He looks capable, she decides, though that’s not enough to convince her. 

“You’re one of Jared’s guys?” Tess asks.

Joel nods. “Sometimes.”

Great. So a part-timer. 

Tess holds back a sigh. “You do a lot of smuggling?”

He shrugs. “Couple a years, yeah.”

“Why haven’t I heard of you, then?” 

“Keep my head down mostly,” he says, still polite, still hard to pin down. “But I’ve heard of you.”

She gave him a grin that was just teeth. “Then I don’t need to explain the rules.”

Work first, then talk. That’s how it always happens. He turns out to be exceptionally good at intimidating people, especially other men, so she keeps him around. It’s as useful as it is envious. She usually needs to provide on-site demonstrations for some people to take her seriously if they don’t already know who she is, but with Joel behind her, glaring like an asshole, that stops becoming necessary. His humble cowboy act disappears the moment they start working, and that’s more than fine with her.

She doesn’t quite remember when she starts sleeping with him. It’s after she makes it worth his while to become one of her regular business affiliates, but the exact dates are fuzzy. There was no clear change to their relationship—one day she simply decides she’s done enough staring at his broad back and calloused hands and invites him to her place. They don’t talk much. Not at first, anyway. 

Never at first.

“What is your day job, exactly?” she asks him one night, lying shoulder-to-shoulder with him on her worn-out mattress. It’s deep into summer, and even with a block fan pointed directly at the bed, moving around is hell. She has a leg thrown over his, the most amount of contact she can stomach right now. 

“Repair and general construction,” he replies, his voice a bit hoarse. It makes his drawl flare up. “Fixin’ things.”

“That must come in handy.”

“Know where all the cracks in the walls are,” he says, catching her meaning. She can hear the faint smile in his voice. 

She arches a brow, impressed. “That how you knew to take the hidden exit off of Moseley?”

He doesn’t respond, but that’s confirmation enough. She can feel his fingers on her skin, searching for her hand. He does that sometimes, after they’ve had sex. She tries not to be touched by how sweet the habit is. Joel isn’t sweet and neither is she.

When he finds her hand, their fingers weave together and the metal of his watch’s clasp presses into her wrist. It’s warm from his body heat.

She lifts up their hands and looks at it. The face is chipped, the hands are still, and the adjustment dial is bent in the socket. It couldn’t be more broken if she stomped on it. 

“Why do you wear that thing?” she asks. “I never see you take it off.”

He doesn’t respond to that either, and this time she’s less certain of what that could mean. 

When she finally does learn about Sarah, it’s by accident. 

She doesn’t usually let him stay overnight. Tess trusts him by now to have her back in a fight, and she even trusts him enough to take off her clothes in front of him, but falling asleep with someone else in her house is a dangerous precedent to set. Next thing she knows he’ll be leaving a toothbrush and set of clothes here and he’ll want to cuddle in bed and give good morning kisses and then this’ll be more than blowing off steam after a hard night of work. And it’s not. They’re clear on what this  _ isn’t _ , even if she doesn’t know what exactly this  _ is. _

But it’s winter when he sleeps over the first night. The wind is biting, it’s far past curfew, and they’re both exhausted. She’s tucked under the blankets beside him, their legs rubbing together to keep warm, and when she starts to drift off she doesn’t bother asking him to leave. 

She sleeps fitfully because there’s someone in her bed when there shouldn’t be, and she’s barely asleep when she’s woken up by yelling. 

Tess sits up on an elbow, immediately awake, her other hand clutching the gun left on the bedside table. She looks beside her to the figure in the dark, curled over himself. The span of Joel’s hand covers his mouth, but she can see his shoulders shaking silently. She waits and listens for him breathing, which comes out finally as a faint sob. 

Tess sets the gun down on the table and squints, trying to get her heart to slow. “Texas?”

He inhales sharply and his hand wipes at his moth. “Sorry,” he whispers. “Go on back to bed.”

The grief in his voice stops her from saying something rude. She sits up and puts a hand on his shoulder, and it’s still trembling from whatever dream had woken him. “You alright?” 

“I’m fine,” he says immediately, his drawl pulling out all the vowels in his words. 

“Come—come lie back down with me,” she tells him, her fingers tightening on his shoulder as she gets settled back against her pillow. He follows her stiffly, lying on his side and facing away from her.

It’s bizarre enough that she actually becomes worried about him. Tess also shifts onto her side, pulling the blankets back up around them both, and looks at him. “Joel?”

His throat works. “Bad dream,” he says, his voice barely audible. “That’s all.”

She should leave it be. He’s not forthcoming, and it’s none of her business what personal history keeps him up at night. But the yell that had woken her rings like a bell in her head. She didn’t know any words to describe how he’d sounded.

“You yelled a woman’s name,” she eventually tells him. “Sarah.” 

His entire body tenses on the bed. When he exhales again it’s shaky, almost another sob. Tess curls towards him—this isn’t cuddling, this is something else—and pulls him against her. He lets her, which freaks her out even more, but his shoulders are warm against her chest and her knees fit like they were meant to against the backs of his. She feels herself tremble as she wraps and arm over his waist and grabs his hand. The band of his watch digs into her skin where it always does. 

“It’s okay,” she tells him, though that can’t possibly be true. Her nose presses into the back of his neck and she listens to his hitched, uneven breathing. If she kisses him now she’ll be done for, so she closes her eyes instead. “S’okay.”

“You said her name,” he says softly, like he’s astonished she knows it. 

She doesn’t bother to correct him and tell him he’d said it first. “Sarah,” she repeats, and he gives another trembling exhale. Tess bites her lip, then asks: “your wife?”

He breathes out a laugh that is all bitterness and no humour. Joel doesn’t reply, and eventually she begins to fall asleep. His breathing slowly evens out and his heartbeat falls back to a more regular, soft thud against her ribs. Huddled this close together she’s almost warm. It’s nice to be warm in January, she thinks. And it’s even nicer to have a warm body to press into. She doesn’t let her thoughts go any further than that.

“Daughter,” Joel whispers at some point, so long after they’re done the conversation she almost doesn’t realise he’s answering her question. 

His daughter? She squeezes his fingers while she works through her shock. The last thing she’d picture him as is a father. 

She doesn’t ask what happened because she’s not an idiot. “I’m sorry,” she says instead, mostly to acknowledge what he’d just said. There’s nothing she can say to make it better anyway.

He brings their clasped hands up to his mouth, his lips resting on her knuckles. He doesn’t kiss them, and she ignores how desperately she wants him to. “Thank you,” he whispers back. “Tess.”

The first time they kiss is in spring. They’re both a bit tipsy from a bottle of bourbon Tess gets as payment for a job, watching the rain clean the windows of Joel’s apartment. The cigarette in her fingers rolls up and down as the heat creeps up the length of it. She takes a drag and offers it to Joel, who surprises her by accepting. 

“You’re a new man,” she says, watching him. He doesn’t inhale; the smoke filters out of his mouth in slow silky threads, and she takes it back from him. “Who doesn’t know how to smoke a cigarette.”

“Ain’t gonna destroy my lungs,” he replies, settling into his corner of the couch. It looks like he wants to put his feet up, but she’s on the other cushion.

“Just your liver,” she says back, and takes a sip of her drink.

“You can live without that,” he tells her, his mouth twitching. 

Tess snorts. “Sure.” She curls her own legs up underneath her and looks out the window. The TV’s not on because neither of them have the allotment hours for it right now, so the weather is the next best form of entertainment. It’s not bad, she thinks. The storm sounds nice against the windows, far away and out of reach. Rain is lovely to listen to when you don’t have to crawl around in it.

“Was thinkin’ of taking a few days off,” he says, draining the rest of his cup and setting it down on the coffee table with a satisfied tap. “Recover, y’know.”

She reaches over and pokes a deep purple bruise on his forearm, which he pulls back with a yelp. “You mean from those?”

He tries to stay serious, but her own grin makes his glare toothless. “You are wicked,” he says, resettling his arm across the back of the couch. “And no. I meant my ankle.”

“Ain-kul,” she repeats back in an exaggerated drawl. His glare doesn’t go away.

“You got pretty busted up, too.”

She can’t deny that. If her shoulder lasts another two years without surgery, she’ll start believing in god again. “But I ain’t fussing about it like you,” she replies, then pats his leg. “Come on. Pull’er up here.”

He looks suspicious, still wary from her poking, but he lifts his bad leg up and lets it rest in her lap. She grabs the cuff of his jeans and rolls it up slowly, gently, and inspects the swollen joint. It’s not broken, but he’d still rolled it pretty hard. 

She lets her hand rest overtop it, feeling the dark springy hairs from his leg press up against her skin. It’s warm beneath her touch. She’ll get him an ice pack in a minute.

Joel sighs. “Your hands are cool,” he says softly, his voice rumbling. Tess looks over at him and sees his eyes are hooded like he’s on the verge of sleep. The lines of his face aren’t so harsh when he’s this relaxed, like something aside from time’s put them there. 

It’s almost domestic, sitting here with him. The good thing about Joel is that he doesn’t need to fill the silence with nonsense, so time around him usually gives her a break away from other people. But now it feels like she’s actually spending time  _ with _ him, not  _ from _ everyone else. 

It’s felt that way for a while now. 

“I’ll get you an ice pack,” she says then, needing some distance. She sets his leg carefully down on the couch as she slips from underneath it.

The ice box in his kitchen is small, and besides a cold compress there’s not much else in it. She remembers early on when people still had enough food to store in their freezer and save for later. 

When Tess walks back Joel looks like he’s asleep, but his hazel eyes open when he hears her footsteps. He’s smiling at her, faint-like, and he probably doesn’t even realise it. She adjusts his leg on the couch without sitting back down, pulling his sock away to rest the compress against his skin.

“There,” she says, looking him over. He’d probably sleep on his couch tonight. 

“Sit on down,” he tells her, nodding to the cushion. “I ain’t bothered.”

Tess rubs at her arms. “I’m tired,” she says then. “I should head back.”

His face falls a little, like he’s disappointed. She shouldn’t be excited about that. He recovers quickly though, and hooks a lazy thumb behind him before closing his eyes again. “Use the bed, s’alright.” 

Tess nods her head like she’s considering it. She is, if she’s being honest, and not just because it’s pissing rain outside. It would take an extra six minutes to get to work from Joel’s apartment, but she’d never been fond of arriving to her shift on time anyway. And she’d slept at his place a number of times by now. It wouldn’t be any different from any other shitty night.

But it feels different. 

She’s still thinking, wondering, when he gets up, and she doesn’t notice until he’s close. He doesn’t touch her, but she can feel his warmth and smell the bourbon and smoke clinging to his clothes like a cologne. Tess looks up, startled out of her thoughts by his height. 

“You should sit down,” she whispers, though she doesn’t know why she’s whispering.

“I want you to stay,” he whispers back. Then he ducks down and kisses her.

His hand comes up to touch her cheek and she grabs his wrist like it’s an anchor. The smell of alcohol and tobacco are stronger now, adding to the heady taste already in her own mouth. The scruff on his face scrapes against her skin as she leans into him. She’s familiar with that sensation by now, at least. He’s pressed his mouth to her body before, to suck and bite and lick, but never on her face—on her lips.

It’s brief, like a kiss between kids, and when he pulls back to look at her his expression is inscrutable.

She has to say something. This can’t be some Moment That They Have. “You’re getting soft on me, Texas,” is what she manages to get out, trying not to sound breathless. 

“Just wanted to,” he explains, sounding a little defensive. “That’s all.”

Tess smiles to dampen the harsh cut of her words, regretting that they’re necessary. She wants to ask him to do it again, over and over. What’s one more concession, she thinks. She can quit anytime she likes.

Instead she dips her head, lets her forehead rest on his collarbone. His hand falls to her shoulder and she feels his thumb smooth over the growing swell on her back. She probably needs to see someone about it. Joints weren’t meant to dislocate so often.

“I’ll stay,” she declares then, almost resigned. She feels him nod, but neither of them move. His breathing is quiet and measured, the motion of his body no less certain for its gentleness.

And he is being gentle. It’s the booze, she decides. A sweet drunk is the most dangerous kind. 

Tess looks up into Joel’s face, younger and more relaxed than she’s used to. “Grab the compress,” she tells him, then steps away, looking toward the bedroom.

They don’t have sex. Both of them are too sore, too exhausted. When she lays down Joel curls up behind her, and it’s so quiet and tender she can’t force herself to say no. He doesn’t say goodnight—nothing’s ever so final with him—but he grabs her hand as he drifts off to sleep.

Tess rubs her mouth with the fingers that are free as she listens to and feels him breathing behind her. Fistfights before an introduction, work before talking, fucking before kissing. They do everything backwards.

She’s fucked.


End file.
